Personally, I think two chips on a stick is the stupidest thing ever. Seriously.

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It is but it all has to do with one company or another having the fastest card, obviously for marketing and prestige reasons since I don't see many buying and NV or AMD making really money out of it. Except maybe this generation of dual GPU Kepler GK104 which is used also on Tesla K10 GPU computing accelerator.

It's just PR. These are limited run cards that are <1000 units. It's surprising though how shoddy the quality seems to be. I was surprised to hear that many of the previous Asus Mars II cards also had major quality issues. You would think they would hand test these things since there's so few of them and they're so expensive. I'd certainly be pissed if my 1k$ card was DOA because of shoddy cooler placement.

2x custom 7970 is a much better option for some great triple screen action. Of course CF support is a mess most of the time, you're better off watercooling a single card and overclocking it to 1300 MHz. Haven't really tried SLI so can't comment on that side.

A much better approach than the pseudo-advertising that HH tends to indulge in - add an AMD Gaming Evolved title with GCN super-friendly compute settings for AMD cards, 3D benching for Nvidia cards for example, and Batman AC shown as a comparison even though the game i.q. levels aren't equal*, and their perceived value based on their pricing ( the Devil 13 rated 8/10 even though no price is listed) that seldom bears any relation to reality.

HI all, thought I would drop in and address a few comments from this thread to give a better understanding of our review (HH).

Regarding game choice, we always tend to go with a selection of the latest games where possible although another consideration is the genre/engine. For example I would always want to have a couple of FPS complimented by a racing, RTS, MMO etc rather than FPS after FPS.

Looking at Batman specifically (the original and the sequel), they were included in a batch of reviews when new but then at later dates moved to be PhysX only content which is why they were missing from some AMD reviews quoted above. Had a newer game happened to support PhysX it would have A) met our criteria for testing the latest games and B) been the PhysX test at the same time. We wouldnt normally do a NV review (or AMD) with a key feature test missing...reviews are about educating people new to the product as well as showing performance. (Borderlands 2 will be added next month, and will drop out other than some specific tests when something similar/newer comes along)

We also don't pick games to favour one manufacturer or the other. Dirt Showdown, as one example, happens to perform best on AMD but it is also the newest "big" racing title around and benefits from being DX11 etc which is also taken into consideration. F1 2012 will replace it, unless something better suited comes along in the racing genre. We used to use NFS but recent games havent had the best engine for real world benchmarking.

That brings me on to the next point, the games themselves play a big part. This review was the first to use Sleeping Dogs. I also took a look at Dark Souls for possible inclusion but removed it due to it being a really dodgy console port (engine wise, the game is great on 360). Frame caps at 30fps being a big problem. Skyrim nearly made it in but for something going wrong with the game install.

It's probably also worth noting that I agree 100% with W1zzard on comparing reviews. It just isn't possible to do that. We for example retest every result in each review on the days running up to the review with the latest drivers, patches etc for all cards included. This review it was only 2 cards (excluding 3DMark) but it can be several. For this review we also OC'd our CPU, to 5GHz, only used the OC Devil BIOS, use a higher spec CPU, more memory, different chipset architecture, different game segments the list goes on when compared to W1zzards work.

There is no right or wrong some will prefer our way, some TPU's. I would say its best to read both (and more) then form a decision based on all of them combined.

I hope that gives a better understanding about how we choose the games included, and the process as a whole.

Finally, its worth noting that the card we received had no heatsink/thermal issues. It worked properly right out of the box.

Huh? Maybe you need to read this review again, and take a look at individual game results rather than the summary at the end. When the drivers work, this is either on par or better than the 690. Problem is that AMD has crap multi-GPU support with their drivers.

When it works, 7970 overclocked crossfire (which is basically what this is with turbo) is significantly faster than a 690 or 680 (stock) SLI. However, it only works like 50-75% of the time.

There's nothing fanboyish about that statement. I wouldn't buy this card over a 690 unless it were $200 cheaper. Maybe you need to lay off the green koolaid?

As Crap Daddy, HumanSmoke, cadaveca... I'd coalesce. As I've said months back AMD would be smart just to sit the whole dual chip card thing out, honestly I think the days of their usefulness have past, if there was ever a time such high-end offering made a bunch of sense.

As to this Devil... PowerColor tried, but but didn't get the horns and tail pointy enough, the devil is in the details. While kudos for trying it's a daunting task for a single AIB to really be able to invest the resources for design, test, and tooling to deliver a competing product polished to the level the GTX690 offering. Although I'd wager that once all the costs of bringing the GTX690 to market versus sales/profit there's not much meat on the bone for Nvidia. But that was not what Nvidia fussed about, they were looking at a Halo product and platform that could emphasis on the merits of the GK104 small chip goodness.

PowerColor took on an ambitious undertaking but I but I see it as a bomb. The idea that the card had an issue which should absolutely never left the build is a colossal fiasco, and its’ reputation marred. The real problem is in mind PowerColor went "stupid greedy" with that $1,000 price tag (even if it was as good or topped a GTX690) for them to consider sell a less refined, not cutting-edge 3 slot cooler card verses the GTX690 is beyond reproach. This would've succeed if they price it at $900, but at this point even a price reduction won’t reestablish the usefulness of the product.

Don't get me wrong though...as an product to showcase engineering, Powercolor did a good job. It's unfortunate that the coolers need to be so big, that Crossfire has driver issues at times, and that W1zz had issues with the card...a card that comes with a screwdriver. A nice screwdriver, at that!

It's still a nice bit of PCB though. If I had the cash, I'd love to have one. The packaging is really nice and well done.

Crossfire sucks. That's not really Powercolor's fault. I doubt they could price it much lower. 2x 7970, plus $50 bridge chip, plus packaging and screwdriver...easy to understand the cost.